The Apple Pencil for iPad Pro launched at electronics retailer Best Buy on Friday, with some stores showing inventory in stock, despite the fact that Apple's own retail locations continue to face constraints.

The Apple Pencil is more than just a drawing utensil -- it can work as a full-fledged, system-wide stylus with the iPad Pro. But there are also certain tasks that just aren't possible with Apple's new accessory. Here's a breakdown of what it can and cannot do.

Still a rare find, with asking prices on eBay double -- or more -- its $99 suggested price, the Apple Pencil is slowly finding its way into the hands of consumers who are early adopters of the jumbo-sized iPad Pro. AppleInsider had the chance to spend an extended period of time with the new stylus, and we offer our initial first look.

Apple is on track to ship between 2.4 and 2.6 million iPad Pro units in its first quarter of sales, though inventory of the giant size tablet and its integral Apple Pencil accessory is facing constraints due to production snarls, according to one insider.

In an interview discussing Apple Pencil's design and subsequent development, Apple CDO Jony Ive said one of the team's main goals was to create an input tool clearly for making marks, not a finger replacement.

A showdown pitting the new iPad Pro display against the rest of the tablet market has found that Apple's new 12.9-inch Retina display is an excellent panel, though it can't outmatch the new iPad mini 4 screen, and even ranks slightly lower than the new Microsoft Surface Pro 4.

More than year after launching on iPad, Apple's flexible multi-carrier Apple SIM officially arrived in Japan on Monday with support from local telecom KDDI, which is partnering with Apple through its "au" mobile network brand.

It has long been speculated that Apple's iPad and MacBook would one day come together in a hybrid device, but Apple CEO Tim Cook put those rumors to bed on Sunday, saying converged machines come with inherent compromises.

Across Apple's fiscal 2015, annual iPad unit sales fell by an astounding 19 percent while iPad revenues fell 23 percent, a plunge from fiscal 2014 of just over $7 billion. The tech industry pundits love to talk about the failure of Apple's tablet business, but are short on the specifics of what's happening. Here's why.

The iPad Pro is Apple's most fully realized example yet of the future of computing, with a workhorse of a processor and a beautiful 12.9-inch Retina display packed inside a svelte, ultraportable design. Current limitations with iOS apps prevent it from being a PC replacement for the most demanding tasks, and at $799 it won't appeal to casual users, but we are confident the iPad Pro will carve out a niche in the high-end market.

Apple is already showing stockouts of certain iPad Pro models less than two days after kicking off preorders, while shipping estimates for Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard, both deemed essential to the iPad Pro experience, have fallen to 4 to 5 weeks.

A day after iPad Pro launched on Wednesday, teardowns and reviews of the gigantic tablet reveal Apple quietly included USB controller hardware capable of supporting high-speed USB 3.0 data connections, suggesting a faster Lightning protocol is in the works.

When Apple first unveiled iPad Pro, it noted that its custom designed A9X chip would be faster than 80 percent of the PCs that shipped this year. Benchmarks indicate that it's not just faster than low end generic PCs, but also faster -- and less expensive -- than Microsoft's Surface Pro 4.

Apple's new iPad Pro is here, boasting 5.6 million pixels packed into its 12.9-inch Retina display, along with a powerful A9X processor that actually outclasses the new 12-inch MacBook. AppleInsider offers a first look at the jumbo-sized, top-of-the-line iPad.